The Pizza Playbook – What Ordering Pizza Teaches Us About F&I

For as long as I can remember, my family had “pizza night” every week. Without fail, every Friday evening we’d all gather around the computer to place our order for two pizzas, one for my parents and one for us kids. We always looked forward to this treat after a long week of school and sports. And mom loved it because someone else was doing the cooking.

Even now, we still go over to mom’s for our famous “pizza night”. Our tastebuds have become more sophisticated over the years, so we take our time perusing the options before we carefully make our selections. As I was going through the ordering process last time, and waiting for our delicious pie to arrive, I couldn’t help but think of the F&I process.

I know that sounds crazy.

I’m sure when you look at your F&I process, you aren’t thinking “I could really go for a pizza right now.” But I challenge you to look at the two a little closer. There are several similarities between F&I and a simple pizza order.

Presentation Makes a Difference

One of our favorite features of the entire pizza order process was the pizza builder. My siblings and I thought it was the coolest thing to click on a topping and see the ingredients fall onto the pizza crust in real time. We’d spend 15 to 20 minutes using the pizza builder, but it only felt like 30 seconds. Oddly, whenever our dad would place an order over the phone instead of online, he would ask us what toppings we wanted, and we never had a response ready. No visuals, no interesting animations, no fun.

It’s the same for your customers when they step into your F&I office. Having an interactive presentation not only makes the time going through forms feel shorter, but helps your customers make decisions easier. They feel more involved in the process rather than simply looking at a bunch of black-and-white on a sheet of paper. In fact, dealerships have seen a rise in CSI scores and an increase in product penetration up to six percent just from using an interactive presentation tool. Customers see all the options available and feel in control, while the F&I manager can maintain face-to-face interaction, offering guidance as needed.

Tracking and Planning Go Hand-in-Hand

One of the standout features we loved was the pizza tracker, which allows customers to monitor their order in real time. There’s a sense of control watching the bar progress from “preparing your order” to “baking your pizza” to “out for delivery.” While the tracker was a nice novelty for us kids, it was also a nice planning tool for my parents. They had a closely estimated time of when the pizza would arrive, and it kept us from asking “how much longer” every two minutes.

When the website or tracker was down, there was always a sense of frustration. We just paid for these pizzas and now we have no idea where they are in the process. If dealing with a ten-dollar pizza causes this much frustration, consider the implications of a deal worth thousands of dollars. You close a deal, you send it off to the lender, and then what? Without a way to track your deals in real time, you lose your ability to plan and prepare for the funding. 83 percent of dealerships estimate their average CIT time to be lower than it actually is. How confident are you in the accuracy of your CIT time today?

Avoiding the Dreaded Reorder

Unfortunately, not every pizza would arrive with the correct toppings (nobody’s perfect, right?). As you can imagine, this was a frustrating situation for all parties involved (the tantalizing scent of pizza wafting through the air only heighted our impatience). We were upset because we had already waited 20 minutes – this is an eternity when you’re hungry – and dad was upset because we had just spent hard-earned money on something we didn’t order. Now we had to start the process over. A phone call to the pizza shop, more waiting, more starvation.

Now apply this perspective to a deal. You have all the paperwork signed and put into the deal jacket, you send it off to the lender, and expect it back funded by the end of the week. However, there was a missed signature (everybody’s human) and now the lender must send it all back to redo and start the process over. The time and cost to send this deal back and forth can quickly add up with each one you sign.

To my knowledge, they haven’t come up with a system to guarantee your pizza arrives with the correct toppings every time, aside from more training for the workers. Fortunately, there is a way to get your deals filled out properly and get funded the first time, every time. eContracting simplifies deal tracking, ensuring nothing is missed from the moment deals leave your hands until they return funded.

The Final Word

The basic pizza order process is a prime example of replacing a complex user experience with a simple system. Why should your F&I process be any different? The next time you audit your F&I office, I encourage you to use the “pizza playbook.” If it wouldn’t make sense for a pizza order process, it shouldn’t make sense for your dealership. And it may be easier to enhance than you think.

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